Making magic with an animated 'Magic Flute'

Rehearsal scenes from Cincinnati Opera's fantastical, animated production of Mozart's "The Magic Flute," a production of the Komische Oper Berlin.
Janelle Gelfand

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Director Daniel Ellis, shows where performers are harnessed behind the wall and are spun onto the stage during a rehearsal of Cincinnati Opera's "The Magic Flute."(Photo: The Enquirer/Kareem Elgazzar)Buy Photo

The Queen of the Night appeared as a giant spider as she sang her vengeful “rage aria,” while suspended in thin air over her daughter, Pamina. Meanwhile, the terrified Pamina was running through an endless hallway, only to be caught in a giant web as red daggers flew all around her.

Actually, nearly everything in that scene for Cincinnati Opera’s production of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” was an illusion – except for the singers. It was all accomplished with film projections against a flat white wall.

“There have been projections in opera for decades, since the early 1990s. But there’s never been a production like this,” said Daniel Ellis, who is directing the opera. “You really have a set with just a big white wall. The magic happens in the animation.”

Ellis was chatting behind the scenes of “The Magic Flute,” running July 15 through 23 at the Aronoff Center, Downtown. This "Magic Flute" is breaking new ground in the way opera is staged.

In an opera where the storyline is already fantastical and a bit complicated, the magic is amplified by animations as well as by a setting updated to the silent movie era.

Perhaps because the public has been weaned on Hollywood special effects and animations from “Star Wars” to “Cars,” the show has been selling out ever since it debuted in Berlin at the Komische Oper Berlin in 2012.

Doors in the wall swivel out to reveal the opera singers who have been harnessed to small, elevated platforms. As they sing, they are surrounded by animations – cartoons of bouncing children, giant butterflies, eyeballs, a kick line of dogs, elephants with martinis, a gorilla belching fire and a small white fairy that flits around. (Hint: She is the Magic Flute.)

Despite all this, there is still an orchestra in the pit playing Mozart’s sublime music.

“What I love about this production is that it’s great for the longtime operagoer and someone who has seen ‘Flute’ many times, or someone who has never seen an opera,” said conductor Christopher Allen, also the company’s resident conductor.

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Performers rehearse the Cincinnati Opera's production of Mozart's "The Magic Flute" at the Aronoff Center in Cincinnati. Animations are projected against a flat white wall during the performance.(Photo: The Enquirer/Kareem Elgazzar)

Even without these animated visuals, there is plenty of fantasy already – as well as Masonic symbolism -- in Mozart’s final opera, a collaboration with his fellow Freemason, Emanuel Schikaneder. In the story, the beautiful Pamina has been kidnapped. Her mother, Queen of the Night, asks Tamino to save her, and he is given a magic flute for protection. He falls instantly in love with Pamina's picture and, along with his birdcatcher sidekick, Papageno, he sets off to rescue her from the tyrant Sarastro.

By Act II, the forces of darkness and goodness seem to have reversed. Now, the queen is the tyrant and Sarastro is good. Pamina and Tamino endure trials of fire and water for admittance to the brotherhood. Papageno also finds a sweetheart, and everyone lives happily ever after.

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Performers rehearse the Cincinnati Opera's production of Mozart's "The Magic Flute" at the Aronoff Center in Cincinnati. Animations are projected against a flat white wall.(Photo: The Enquirer/Kareem Elgazzar)

It is a "Singspiel," a German light opera with spoken dialogue. For this production, about an hour of the dialogue has been trimmed. Instead, silent movie-style “text plates” project a few words to give the viewer the general idea. A pianist at a fortepiano fills in during the titles with excerpts from Mozart’s Fantasias in C Minor and D Minor.

The main characters suggest stars of the silent movies. Pamina has the short bob hairdo of flapper-era star Louise Brooks, the birdcatcher is a Buster Keaton-style Papageno and the evil Monostatos reminds of Nosferatu. They wear Chaplin-esque white facial makeup, black eyes and smoky lips so that the projections will pick up the whites of their eyeballs.

The concept is a co-creation of Berlin director Barrie Kosky with the two founders of the British theater company 1927, Suzanne Andrade and Paul Barritt. The company is known for merging live action with animation and looks to the silent film era for inspiration. (It’s not by coincidence that 1927 is also the year of the first talkie, Al Jolson’s “The Jazz Singer.”)

Behind the scenes of a rehearsal last week, a split-second ballet played out in semi-darkness behind the big white wall. Stage managers buckled and harnessed singers up high in the wall. When the doors opened, they might appear to be sitting on a branch or teetering on the edge of a cliff.

In front of the wall, Ellis was concerned with synching the singers' acting to the video footage that played around them. Each singer had to learn the stylized exaggerations of silent-movie acting.

“In this show, it’s all about precision. All of the moves are based on silent movie moves from the 1920s,” said Ellis, who was assistant director of the American premiere in Minnesota Opera (a co-production with Los Angeles Opera) and directed a revival in Berlin about a year ago.

Magnified facial expressions are important in order to convey emotion such as fear, as in a "damsel in distress," he added. That can be challenging for the singers, who might be performing on a perch halfway up the wall.

For tenor Aaron Blake, appearing as Tamino in this production for the fourth time, each time is a learning process.

“It’s as much about synchronization as it is about acting,” he said. “We did study the movies of Buster Keaton and Nosferatu in order to get the very crisp, stylized, breath-filled action down.”

It’s also a feat of high technology. Hand-drawn animation has been put into a computer program, resulting in 800 video cues. For the singers, it’s almost like working in front of a "green screen" because they can’t see the video.

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Performers rehearse the Cincinnati Opera's production of Mozart's "The Magic Flute," Thursday, June 29, 2017, at the Aronoff Center in Cincinnati. Animations are projected a against a flat white wall.(Photo: The Enquirer/Kareem Elgazzar)

“In the first act, an owl lands on Tamino’s hand. He has to coordinate getting the hand in a certain position on the screen, so it looks like a bird has landed on his hand,” Ellis said.

When it all works, he said, “you forget it’s a wall, and it looks like (the singers) are floating in this giant film and part of it."

"The Magic Flute" is an opera that blends both human comedy and profound inspiration. Does this production succeed? Ellis said it remains “amazingly traditional.”

"It was the first time I was convinced that opera was really written for the masses," he said. "Because we’re using the vernacular of a movie to tell an opera.”

If you go

What: Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” Christopher Allen, conductor; Daniel Ellis, stage director.
When: 7:30 p.m. July 15, 20, 22 and 3 p.m. July 23
Where: Procter & Gamble Hall, Aronoff Center, Downtown
Tickets: From $45. 513-241-2742, cincinnatiopera.org
Notable: Christopher Allen, Cincinnati Opera’s resident conductor and a graduate of the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, has won the 2017 Sir Georg Solti Conducting Award. The Solti Foundation U.S. announced that the foundation's $30,000 grant is the largest awarded to young American conductors in the United States.
Allen is a rising conductor of both opera and symphony. His mentors include James Conlon and tenor Placido Domingo at Los Angeles Opera, where he was an associate conductor. Recently, he made his UK debut leading “The Barber of Seville” at the English National Opera. After leading Cincinnati Opera’s “The Magic Flute” this summer, he will conduct the North Carolina premiere of Jennifer Higdon's “Cold Mountain.”
Next season, Allen returns to Opera Theatre of Saint Louis to conduct a new production of Verdi’s “La Traviata” directed by the soprano Patricia Racette.